Flash Glance! Infectonator: World Dominator

Infectonator: World Dominator was pretty popular when it came out, at least as far as flash games go. I’ll give you the basic rundown: you play as some faceless mastermind who is trying to wipe out every major population area in the world by using a zombie plague. The challenge is that you have to accomplish this indirectly – out of a village of people, you start out only being able to turn one of them into a zombie. A zombie who starts out with a very limited amount of (un)life left, who moves very slow and is very weak. But if you line the dominoes up just right, one zombie can easily turn into a village full of zombies. Chaos ensues, you pick up the money to throw into researching how to improve your zombies, and the cycle continues. Your kind of thing? Then read on for some more detail.

I gave you the basic rundown above, but let’s talk detail. First of all, Infectonator makes fine use of 8-bit (16-bit?) looking graphics. Blocky and pixely, but still having that Ye Olde Game charm as a result. Personally, I never get tired of this kind of art direction – I’m not sure anyone really does, but if for some reason you prefer sharp graphics you should give this one a pass. That said, the detail on this game still gets the job done and then some. Somehow the artist in this game has that gift where he can pack enough detail into a tiny pixel range to still adequately represent a variety of characters – police, various nationalities of citizens, a variety of zombies. Blood and disease aside, the result is actually pretty cute.

As I mentioned at the start, the gameplay on this one is very indirect. You start out with the ability to only launch one four-way explosion of a virus into a constantly moving crowd of citizens, and your goal is to instigate a chain reaction of infections. That means watching and waiting, trying to time things just right so the zombies you create will be close enough to a crowd to raise adequate havoc. As you wipe people out, they leave behind money – move your mouse pointer over the cash to collect it. The cash can be spent on additional research for your zombie virus, allowing you to make the zombies live longer, move faster, do more damage, resist more damage… thus making you capable of taking on more and more complicated population centers who are stocked with more and more dangerous defenders. Eventually these defenders start shooting the zombies rather than merely running away, and sometimes there are ‘special’ defenders whose defeat can lead to researching particularly unique zombie infections, including a Michael Jackson looking ‘Thriller’ zombie.

Honestly, the game isn’t all that hard – this is one of those games that falls into the category of “So long as you keep trying, you’re guaranteed to win.” However, it’s pretty fun to see how much chaos you can cause with the least amount of action, there’s a variety of fun secrets to unlock as well as achievements to pick up. So if you’re looking for a simple Flash game you can sneak some time into when you’re at a computer, just check out the game at one of the usual Flash game portals and give it a shot.